The present disclosure generally relates to wheeled carts for transporting objects, and more particularly, to staging carts adapted for use in mattress manufacturing and storage facilities to facilitate movement of multiple packaged mattresses packaging from and to and area, e.g., from a pre-staging area to a shipping container.
The transportation of large, heavy or unwieldy articles such as mattresses remains a problem, even in the professional moving industry. The need to move or lift such articles, using only human power, has led to the development of helpful devices such as dollies, pulley/lever assemblies, hand trucks and the like. However, despite the existence of many such manual devices, there remain situations where all known devices are useless (e.g. movement of unwieldy and/or limp articles within typical buildings) and/or inefficient.
The typical mattress is very heavy, very limp, and commonly equipped only with a limited handle or support strap carrying system. The locations of the handles/support straps are such that they become useless in many scenarios (e.g. ascending/descending a flight of stairs, regardless of whether or not the flight includes one or more turns). Moreover, simultaneously moving multiple mattresses using handles is difficult. Mattresses can weigh hundreds of pounds, and the lack of appropriate means to hold on to a mattress makes manipulation within a typical home an exasperating, and often exhausting, process even for physically imposing individuals. It is a two-person job, and there is no way for two people to get four arms around a mattress.
During the manufacture and/or storage of mattresses, the mattresses are typically first packaged in heavy gauge plastic and/or boxes suitable for transportation. The packaged mattresses are then stacked on top of one another on the ground, where one of the major surfaces of the mattress, i.e., top or bottom surfaces, is oriented to face the ground. It is generally a two or more person task to move the stack of packaged mattresses from the ground location to another area, e.g., a shipping container. Moreover, the process is generally inefficient since one mattress at a time is typically moved. Even in instances where multiple stacked mattresses are carried by a movable cart, the carts generally have a fixed surface that still requires two or more individuals to physically lift the mattresses from the face-down orientation to the other area.